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Rhianwen Daniel
This paper articulates the implications of linguistic relativity for liberal nationalism and the objectivity of national culture. The nationalism scholarship of recent decades has been largely characterized by a modernist and constructivist orthodoxy that emphasises the artificial, top-down and socially constructed nature of national culture. This, critics argue, undermines the extent to which it can be considered objective and, by extension, the corresponding degree of objectivity that liberal nationalists ascribe to it. In the normative debate, this has often been used as a basis for invalidating liberal nationalists' arguments for the state promotion of national culture. By contrast, this paper argues that linguistic relativity in fact consolidates the objective dimension to national culture by substantiating the necessary clustering of language, culture and history. As such, the constructivist and modernist-inspired objections to the state promotion of national culture are shown to hinge upon a misleadingly incomplete characterisation of it.
